Alien Pedagogy

One of my goals going into summer school was to design a course in which skills were clearly assessed and tracked back.

Categories of Objectives/ Standards:

• Reading
• Writing
• Speaking
• Listening
• Media Literacy
• Research

So to this end, I picked objectives that went alongside each of these categories. Then I decided how to assess each of them. Then I worked on building skills for each of them. Often, the way I taught content was to have student interact with the text in skill building activities.

For example:

Goal: Speaking – Students will speak with dynamism using an image that enhances rather than distracts from the speaker’s presence.

Task: Present one image to the text that summarizes the message of The Crucible.

To do this, the student is required to interact with the text, but my feedback to them will primarily be on their presentation speaking goals.

Reflection:

Normally, I’d prefer to really go after the student’s discussion of content in my feedback. I shifted that discussion to the time when the students were choosing their image. Since we did more than one skill-based activity like this, I found student interpretation and analysis grew in response to the activities that we’d done.

It was as though they were learning.

My understanding is that formative assessment tasks should not be for marks since it penalizes students for learning slowly, rather than rewarding them for learning. However, I’ve always attached some grade to formative tasks, fearful that students wouldn’t complete the assignment if I didn’t attach a grade to it.

In summer school, I decided to do formative assessment. I’m glad I did.

For one thing, the students often did pick up skills slowly. So having more than one opportunity to demonstrate skill and receive feedback before assessment was really helpful. So when students started getting high grades, they were quite surprised that their learning had been recognized.

I realized that formative assessment should have real feedback — perhaps more detailed than summative feedback. This struck me as counter-intuitive at first — shouldn’t the graded assessment have more feedback? However, if the graded assessment is the last time that we assess that skill then the time that the student is given to learn comes from the formative assignments.

I realized that formative assessment should be recorded. This fall, I’ll add formative assessment tasks to my gradebook but with a 0% weighting. In this way, it is transparent that students are learning, or that they’re not. I think it has additional benefits, including: increased student motivation, it imposes UBD planning on the teacher’s unit plan, and it provides diagnostic data for the learning community.

Coming to this point, I’m quite embarrassed that I didn’t get here sooner. If the last two years counted for marks, I suppose my teacher grade would take a hit because of it.

I’ve begun spring break reviewing my daily lesson plans to see how they align with UBD. It’s been a surprisingly effective form of self assessment.

Changing the Lesson Plans:

To begin, our department records lesson plans (from top to bottom like a graphic organizer) like this:

• Topic
• Objective
• Activities
• Assessment
• Resources
• Reflection

I’ve switched my daily lesson plans to this format:

• Objective
• Assessment
• Activities

My resources are now listed in parentheses in the activities. They can be found on Rubicon (our curriculum database) and Moodle. I have decided to move towards more unit reflection in my records.

Reflection:

I’ve felt quite pleased with this year’s lesson planning. However, this process has helped me to realize that some of my lessons are not as direct as I had thought. Though it may seem like a trivial change, moving the asssessment task above the lesson activities really makes it obvious when my formative assessment could have more effectively connected my summative assessment and my lesson activities.

How do you record and review your instruction?